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February's Snowy Wallop

February’s Snowy Wallop

February in New York City packed a snowy wallop, but we hardy Big Apple types shoveled and sloshed our way through — one major snowstorm early in the month that dropped nearly two feet of the white stuff upon us, another the following week that was less big but still not small, and a few additional dustings and flurries. I don’t mind being under house arrest in my Brooklyn apartment, which is…

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Remains of the Day: Fort Greene Ramble

Remains of the Day: Fort Greene Ramble

Getting on for 4PM yesterday, I just couldn’t stand it anymore. I had to get out of my apartment. The sun had been teasing in and out all day. It would suffuse the front windows of my ground-level brownstone apartment with sudden, glorious light and I would make a move toward the door. Then, just as suddenly, all would go dark and gloomy, my motivation would flag, and I’d collapse on the couch…

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Back to My Roots: Cheap Old Houses

Back to My Roots: Cheap Old Houses

If you are an old-house aficionado, you may already know about the candy store of vintage American architecture that is CIRCA. and the constellation of old-house websites and Instagram pages that surround it, bursting with eyebrow Colonials, Victorian gingerbreads, American Foursquares, Italianate jewel boxes, historic churches and more. These covetable buildings are all for sale. Elizabeth…

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Covid Times in Brooklyn

Covid Times in Brooklyn

Somehow, the days are both too long and too short. Time stretches ahead, the calendar blank. Yet you go out for a walk and before you know it, the sky is dark. I came back to Brooklyn from the East End of Long Island in early November. I cruised into my neighborhood on a Saturday night when the mood was briefly celebratory, following the announcement of the election results, when the pandemic…

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Reasons We've Loved New York: Restaurants Lost in the Pandemic

Reasons We’ve Loved New York: Restaurants Lost in the Pandemic

I scan the list with my heart in my throat, occasionally whispering “oh no!”, remembering places I’ve been and loved, meant to go back to, never did and now never will. The list, of some of the hundreds of mom-and-pop-type businesses closed in New York City since this cursed pandemic began, is in New York Magazine’s annual “Reasons We Love New York” issue, out this week. The magazine, partnered…

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New Book Gives Rattan Furniture its Glorious Due

New Book Gives Rattan Furniture its Glorious Due

A contemporary London sitting room with chairs by the 20th century decorator Renzo Mongiardino, often credited with popularizing rattan furniture for indoor use I love vintage rattan furniture so much that I once toyed with the idea of opening a store in lower Manhattan, back when stores were a good idea, and calling it Bamboozled. That would have been a misnomer, since bamboo is a different…

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Seize the Sunset

“Live each season as it passes: breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit…”

Henry David Thoreau

The year’s events have made us feel more vulnerable and more conscious of our precarious human lives. Maybe that’s why the passing days seem all the more precious.

Lately I can’t bear to spend a sunny day indoors. I want to get fresh air into my lungs, even if I have to surreptitiously…

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Dream of Oaxaca

Las Golindrinas

Las Golindrinas

My four days in Oaxaca last month are a fading dream. I was already starting to feel nervous about riding in crowded vans, as we did one day to get to the nearby ruins, and my hand sanitizer got a lot of use. But basically it was in the Before Times, when one could still move about freely, go into restaurants and shops at will, and travel on public conveyances,…

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Brooklyn Quarantine Diary

Quarantine is rooted in the Italian words quarantenara and quaranta giorni, or 40 days, the period of time the city of Venice forced ship passengers and cargo to wait before landing in the 14th and 15th centuries to try to stave off the plague.

How’s your enforced staycation going? For me, a single woman who lives alone and works from home, quarantine is very much like my regular life. I’m…

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First Timer in Mexico City

Dog walkers in Parque Mexico

In the National Library

La Abuela taco stand

Coyoacan, Frida’s nabe

SIX DAYS AGO, I got back from two weeks in Mexico. It was supposed to have been a three-week vacation, but fears of the U.S.-Mexico border closing suddenly and the possibility, if flights were cancelled, of having to rent a car and drive cross country from Baja California to NYC (38 hours – I checked),…

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These Walls Talk: History of an 1830s Brooklyn House

These Walls Talk: History of an 1830s Brooklyn House

I AM BACK in Brooklyn for the winter and turning my attention to another of my vintage properties: a four-story brick in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, located conveniently but noisily between two major arteries, Flatbush Avenue and Atlantic Avenue.

Doesn’t look like much, perhaps, with the fire escape and all, but it has history. I found out recently that it was built in 1835 by a mason named…

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Appreciating October: Old Houses & Fall Color

Appreciating October: Old Houses & Fall Color

OCTOBER HAS BEEN A MONTH for remembering my love of old houses, which is why I started this blog in the first place, and for being blown away once again by the beauty of Long Island’s South Fork. That includes my own humble half-acre, above and below, whose fall colors are more brilliant than at any time in the decade I’ve been here.

They say it’s because of all the rain we had this season…

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Flowers on Parade, Plus an Instant Cottage Garden

Flowers on Parade, Plus an Instant Cottage Garden

The morning after I got back from my Italian vacation — April 3rd, I think it was — I called my plumber out on the East End of Long Island and said, “Charles, would it be jumping the gun to turn to the water on now?” It would be, he said. “There was ice in the bucket this morning.” I don’t know what bucket he was referring to, but never mind that.

Point being, I had to wait another week…

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BOOK REVIEW: 111 Places in Brooklyn That You Must Not Miss

BOOK REVIEW: 111 Places in Brooklyn That You Must Not Miss

When I saw that Brooklyn had been newly added to the list of international travel destinations covered by the German publisher Emons in its 111 Places series (joining the Twin Cities; Verona, Italy; Malta; Liverpool and other less-expected spots), I have to admit I allowed myself a small scoff.

As a Brooklyn resident for 42 years, my jaded self doubted there were many sites in the book I…

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Agrigento's Valley of the Temples, with a Pit Stop in Noto

Agrigento’s Valley of the Temples, with a Pit Stop in Noto

Agrigento’s Valley of the Temples is the most amazing place you’ve never heard of. At least I had never heard of it, until I began planning a trip to Sicily a few months back.

Turns out Sicily’s south coast has an ancient Greek temple complex said to be the most outstanding outside the Acropolis in Athens (and unlike the Acropolis, it has the advantage of feeling undiscovered).

But first…

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My Kind of Place: Syracuse's Ortygia Island

My Kind of Place: Syracuse’s Ortygia Island

I’ve found a spot I could make my base for a period of time some winter, when I’m not rushing through Sicily as fast as I can in the time allotted: it’s the island of Ortygia, a labyrinthine medieval quarter connected to the city of Syracuse by two or three short bridges.

View from our room – in two directions – at the Hotel Gutkowski

I can see myself settling in for a spell and enjoying many…

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Central Sicily in a Day: Hill Towns, Mosaics and Unbeatable Views

Central Sicily in a Day: Hill Towns, Mosaics and Unbeatable Views

we were reluctant to leave Palermo without visiting its renowned archaeological museum, so we squeezed in an hour there on our last morning. Seeing the magnificent sculpture and decorative arts of millennia past always helps put things in perspective.

Much of the museum’s permanent collection centers on architectural salvage from Selinunte, a Greek city on the southern shore of Sicily with a…